News
SCI 2021 Annual Report
The School of Computing and Information's 2020-2021 Annual Report is now available! The report is an exciting brief summary of example activities in the 2021 fiscal year, and reflects the energy, optimism and dedication of the SCI community.
Pitt2Pitt Profile: Oliva Larson, MLIS Student
December 2, 2020
Olivia Larson has seen several corners of Pitt’s operating world — from an undecided first-year at the Pittsburgh campus, to an education major at Pitt Greensburg, and now a graduate student in the School of Computing and Information. She knows the University pretty well.
Sonia Cromp '21 awarded best paper at Educational Data Mining 2021
Sonia Cromp (BS in Computer Science, BA in Linguistics, Class of 2021) was awarded the best paper award at the Workshop for Undergraduates in Educational Data Mining and Learning Engineering at the 2021 Educational Data Mining Conference for her paper Essay Revision and Corresponding Grade Chang as Captured by Text Similarity and Revision Purposes. The paper was written in conjunction with Dr. Diane Litman (Professor, CS and LRDC.)
Dr. Adriana Kovashka’s NSF CAREER project aims to lower the cost of AI learning
Computer Science professor Dr. Adriana Kovashka received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in May 2021. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is an NSF-wide activity that offers the Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
DINS Welcomes Two Army War College Fellows
The Department of Informatics and Networked Systems is pleased to welcome Colonel Christopher J. Miller and Lieutenant Colonel Peter J. Amara, both of whom will serve as Army War College Fellows in the Department for the Academic Year 2021-2022.
Students Create Games for Change at Games4SocialImpact 2021
The Empire of Mali. Wildfires. Social anxiety and agoraphobia. Mitch McConnell.
How do these relate to one another?
These were the game subjects tackled by the winning student teams of this year’s Games4SocialImpact.
Computer Science PhD alum Ihsan Qazi receives 2021 Sheth International Young Alumni Achievement Award
After receiving his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Pitt in 2010, Qazi has returned to Pakistan to take a coveted position as an assistant professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences.
SCI Interim Dean Childers Shares 2021 Annual Dean's Update
SCI Interim Dean and Professor of Computer Science Bruce Childers shared the 2021 Annual Dean's Update. "As we work toward achieving our goals and taking on new challenges in the coming year, I look forward to continuing SCI's story together with energy optimism, and thoughtfulness," said Dean Childers.
Behnam Rahdari, Alireza Javadian Sabet, and Peter Brusilovsky Win Best Demo Award
SCI PhD students Behnam Rahdari and Alireza Javadian Sabet and Professor Peter Brusilovsky received the best demo award at the 15th ACM Recommender Systems Conference. Their demonstration, titled “Connecting Students with Research Advisors Through User-Controlled Recommendation,” presents the Grapevine system to recommend research advisors to undergraduate and graduate students.
Please join us in congratulating Behnam, Alireza, and Peter on this exciting achievement!
Malihe Alikhani Receives Honorable Mention and Best Paper Award
SCI Assistant Professor Malihe Alikhani recently received an honorable mention for a presentation as well as a best paper award.
Project Led by Martin Weiss and Other Spectrum Experts Receives $25 Million Grant
The National Science Foundation's Spectrum Innovation Initiative recently awarded a $25 million five-year grant to SpectrumX, a spectrum research project which features SCI Professor Martin Weiss among its leadership. The project brings together experts from a variety of universities to develop spectrum policy and technical innovations.
SCI Faculty Get Grant from Google to Enhance Ethical Competence in Curriculum
SCI faculty member Yu-Ru Lin is the principal investigator for a $10K grant from Google titled "Cultivating Ethical Competence of The Next-Gen AI Workforce" to develop a multi-disciplinary AI ethics curriculum for both undergraduate- and graduate-level machine learning courses. This project will focus on cultivating ethical competence and technical skills to identify and address ethical issues in the AI field.
SCI faculty members Malihe Alikhani, Rosta Farzan, Rebecca Hwa, and Diane Litman are co-investigators for the project.
Malihe Alikhani Co-Authors Paper Urging NLP to Focus on Signed Languages
SCI Assistant Professor Malihe Alikhani recently co-authored a paper encouraging the natural language processing (NLP) community to include signed languages in their research. NLP is an area of study in computer science that focuses on helping computers understand human language and allowing people to communicate using technological tools like machine translation, voice-controlled assistants, and chatbots.
Panayiotis V. Benos Receives Research Grants for Projects Related to COPD
SCI Professor Panayiotis (Takis) V. Benos recently received research grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute for two projects related to the study of the lung disease COPD. Benos' project "COPD Subtypes and Early Prediction Using Integrative Probabilistic Graphical Models" aims to build a comprehensive computational framework for disease sub-classification, identify stable COPD sub-types at the baseline and longitudinally, and build interpretable models of the disease.
Amy Babay Working on Project to Protect Critical Infrastructure
SCI Assistant Professor Amy Babay is investigating ways to protect critical infrastructure that may have suffered under a natural disaster, which provides an inlet for malicious actors to launch cybersecurity attacks. In a 3-year project titled "Severe Impact Resilience: Framework for Adaptive Compound Threats", Dr.